School Boards Call For Creationism? Well, by Darwin, Let 'em Have It

Trinity Reporter (Winter 2006)

School boards and politicians, including the President of the United States, are clamoring
for public schools to teach "intelligent design" together with Darwinian evolution so
students may hear "both sides." Mainstream scientists strongly oppose teaching religious
ideas disguised as science and argue that there is no scientific controversy. As a
mainstream scientist and educator, I understand that there really isn't a second side; that
alternatives to evolution have repeatedly failed the tests of science. However, that
doesn't mean there is no controversy - and those failing to understand this point are missing
an educational opportunity.

The recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life found that 64% of Americans
favor teaching creationism along with evolution, and 38% even want to replace evolution
with creationism. Clearly, in a society where surveys have consistently shown that a
majority of Americans believe humans are in some fundamental way different from, and
ascendant over, other animals, children are continually exposed to creationist challenges
to basic science long before they even get to school. Where then, if not in the public
schools, will there be an opportunity to confront and debunk pseudoscientific notions that
will otherwise persist into adulthood? Herein lies an educational opportunity that should
be embraced, not rejected, by scientists and teachers.

Mainstream scientists routinely argue that creationism (or its recent incarnation as
"intelligent design") is religion - which, indeed, it is - and that religion has no place in a
science classroom. There is ample precedent, however, for addressing faith-based
hypotheses in the public school science curriculum. Consider Ptolemy's epicycles.
Virtually every physics or physical science text I know of that discusses the structure of
the solar system begins with the erroneous geocentric hypothesis that the Sun and other
planets revolve around the Earth in small circular motions conjoined with larger circular
orbits. Why circles? Because the Church believed that a perfect deity demands a perfect
geometric figure (a circle) for planetary motion. The argument was simply a version of
"intelligent design" applied to physics and astronomy, yet mainstream scientists do not
object to its inclusion because in a properly taught science class the instructor will soon
enough present the correct picture of a heliocentric system with elliptical planetary
orbits governed by Newton's laws of motion and gravity.

Similarly, to discuss creationism alongside of evolution does not have to mean distributing
propaganda provided by creationist organizations. Rather, teachers can guide students
through the process of evaluating scientific and pseudoscientific ways of understanding the
development of living organisms and demonstrate by force of evidence that only real science
provides an empirically testable self-consistent explanation. In numerous resources
outside the expurgated textbooks chosen by school boards, there are endless examples that
teachers can use to show that evolution is a fact and that nothing in biology makes sense
except in the light of evolution.

That biology is not ordinarily taught this way in the U.S. is due less to resistance by
creationists than to the deplorable unpreparedness of many teachers and the mad pace and
shallow content that parents increasingly demand of their schools' science curriculum.

To teach any science well, so that students accept the basic principles as part of their
core convictions, requires two things: well-prepared teachers and adequate time. A
well-prepared biology teacher is more likely to have a bachelors or masters degree in
biology than a degree in general education, and substantial exposure to chemistry and
physics. Such a teacher will have the confidence to handle the difficult, and sometimes
hostile, questions that students may pose regarding evolution. Anyone wishing to teach
biology competently must be prepared to undergo this rigorous training. But adequate
training will be of little use if teachers are expected to race through an overloaded
course curriculum designed primarily for students to take multiple-choice standardized
tests for college entrance and advanced-placement credit. A transient memory of biological
factoids is little better than not having studied biology at all. Far better is a biology
class that, through unhurried pertinent comparisons, shows students how the science
underlying evolution accounts in myriad ways for the complexity and diversity of living
organisms, whereas the pseudoscience of creationism always leads to the same barren
conclusion: the invocation of a supernatural agent.

The matter of how (or even whether) evolution is taught in U.S. schools has ramifications
beyond the classroom. The evolution of living organisms on Earth is only a small part of
an overall cosmic evolution whose features physicists have been elucidating in ever greater
detail. Observations reaching farther and farther back in time reveal a universe that has
always operated according to impersonal physical laws without design or guidance from any
supernatural agent. This is not a message creationists want to hear. But for the sake of
humanity's future it is a message every human being needs to know, for its import is this:
Humans are but one of many kinds of organisms that share the living space on a finite
planet. Nothing "out there" is looking after their well-being. And if, through
carelessness, greed, and stupidity, they irretrievably damage the one place in the cosmos
where they evolved and can live, then, like any other unfit species, they will go extinct.